My Twitter Experience

My favorite part of using Twitter is sports updates while they happen.  I no longer live in the market of the teams I follow, and cannot watch them on TV.  It is also neat to see other people commenting on the same events while they are happening.  I don't get news on current events from Twitter, but every once in a while, a tweet will pop up that will catch my interest and I'll go and research it.  The part of Twitter I don't like is, because I follow over 200 accounts, the information on my newsfeed is constantly being changed, and can get visually overwhelming.  Even though you pick the people or companies you follow, there is no way to filter out the less important and relevant information, unless you actively go to their page.  Many people's tweets are replies, and because you don't initially see the original message, the reply is essentially meaningless.

Twitter allows you to get real time reactions t events from people all over the world.  People with smartphones are able to quickly write a tweet a post instantly as something happens.  Facebook allows you to do the same thing, but you get information from people that you are friends with, people that have confirmed you as a friend, limiting the amount.  On Twitter you can follow anybody without having to wait for confirmation, unless they have a secure account.  The biggest difference is Twitter is more about following people you don't know directly and Facebook is.  Twitter is different from the traditional blog because it limits the size of your posts.  On a typical blog, the writer's limit is only what they can write and what they think the average reader is willing to complete.  Twitter allows readers to quickly finish a post and move on.  By limiting the amount of characters per posts, I sometimes get frustrated because it usually takes me more than 140 characters for me to complete a thought, I fear that the readers will not understand fully what I'm trying to say, and it's even more limiting if you post a link.

The conversations I have on Twitter are usually just with my friends that have accounts, and that is only two people.  Most of the people I have do not have accounts so I talk to them on Facebook or on the phone.  Most of the conversations I have are with my friend Mark and are usually shallow and vacuous in nature, but if we wanted to have a real conversation we would talk on the phone.

Before this weekend, I used Twitter sparingly seeing only some of the benefits, I generally only saw how it impacted me personally and since most of the people I know don't use it, I didn't see the impact as being very substantially.  After this weekend I realized that Twitter is important because it is a way to get many people's opinions quickly, and knowing what people think and value is important to many organizations like the government and companies.  It is like a constant poll of people's attitudes towards certain topics and policies.

I think Twitter can be used to have meaningful communications and political debates, because it allows a person to connect directly to many people without having to know them or get confirmation from them, but with so much information being shared, it is hard for certain messages to get noticed, and it is hard to express a thought when you are limited to the amount of characters you can post.  I think Twitter can be used for political debates and meaningful communication, but those usually require the expression of complex thoughts, which are hard to complete in 140 characters.